Personal Development Re-Imagined

Money – Income

Think of 5 people who have helped you financially in the last year or two. Maybe they helped you find a job, gave you some financial advice that worked, or were mentors. Contact each one, let them know that you were just thinking of them, and wanted to thank them for their financial help in the past. Catch up with them on how they are doing briefly, and then let them know your financial situation or struggles and see what they advice, they will be more than happy to help. It’s interesting how when you acknowledge and thank someone for their help they are more than happy to provide you with a lot more, most often on their own without you even asking. After recently quiting my job, I started talking to an old employee who left my company 6 months ago, and I let him know how I missed joking around with him at work, and wanted to catch up. I also let him know that I just quit my current job. He informed me that they are currently hiring at his company and offered to help me find a new job without me even asking.

The credit for this tip goes to Noah St John and his Success Clinic program. As with any other tip I learn and share, I recommend you take action right away even if it’s a very small step. Pick up the phone and make the first call right now, and let me know how it turns out.

Associated Content offers an upfront average payment of $4-$8 for each article your write for them. While their website says that it may take up to 2 weeks for a submitted article to be reviewed, on average my articles get reviewed within 5 days. Here are some of the few types of articles you can write for Associated Content:

General Articles – Can be about any topic of interest

Local Activities or Events – Whats going on in your neighborhood this week?

Local Attractions – What are some of yours? Where do you take your relatives when they visit?

Local Businesses

Local Real Estate – Are you or any of your friends listing a property for sale?

Local Schools

College Research Paper – Put any of your old college research papers to use

Editorial – Opinion pieces, social and political commentaries

Guides – Products, how-to’s

Interviews – with famous people, community heroes and other interesting folks

News Items – Any new hot piece of news

Reviews – Review just about any book, movie or product

Short Story – Feeling creative maybe adventurous?

Travel Guides – Where did you take your last trip? Where did you stay?

Associated Content also lets you submit audio. Audio includes original songs, compositions, “how-to’s” and jokes. Associated Content also lets you submit videos. A video can be an animation, tutorial, news, videoblog, or a home video.

Associated Content also provides performance pay for your articles. This is based on how many views your article gets. To get more views make sure you have a popular keyword rich title for the article. Also make sure to mention many of the title’s main keywords frequently throughout the article. For example, if the article is titled “Popular Christmas Gifts on Everyone’s List”, the keyword’s “Christmas”, “Gifts”, “List” should appear frequently throughout the article. This type of article would get many visits during the Christmas season since people frequently search for popular Christmas gift ideas online during the holiday season. The more visits your article gets the higher your performance pay will be. My friend who has referred me to Associated Content is earning $30-$40 monthly from Associated content only from performance pay for a handful of keyword rich articles he submitted.

If you submit one article a day to Associate Content you will earn $5 on average which is about $150 of extra an income a month or $1800 a year. Not a bad chunk of change. This is also not counting all the extra performance pay your articles will earn. I highly recommend you give Associated Content a try today.

Joining cash crate is free, quick and simple. After signing up you will be presented with a list of offers, surveys, services or products to try out. Upon completing an offer, a survey or a trial, cash crate will deposit money into your account. Cash crate offers pay anywhere from $0.80-$10 depending on the specific opportunity. There is on limit on how much money you can make on through cash crate. Cash crate is also a legitimate service unlike many of the scam “get paid to take survey” sites out there. I highly recommend you give cash crate a try.

Managing a home based business is not that easy. Though it has got its own advantages there are several problems that come with it. You might have a lot of distraction from your environment or even from your family. It’s really a difficult task to manage your schedule while you are running your business from home.

For ensuring good productivity in your home based business you should learn to separate your home life and business work and manage accordingly. I have tried to provide some tips that might help you in your home based business:

You should schedule your time such that your important business works find the right amount of time rather than some petty works.

Set goals each and every day. By the end of the day ask yourself whether you have finished them all. If not, find out the reason for your lag. This type of daily goal setting gives you lot of confidence in your line of business. This also helps in proper usage of your precious time.

You might have children at home. But don’t get distracted by them or other members of your family. Don’t take the advantage of working from home. Let them understand you are still working. Allocate separate timings for your leisure activities. Most of the home businesses have gone unproductive because of their family distractions.

Invest some extra time into your business. During the initial stages of your business, make sure you are working for a longer time period than usual. This might help in giving a firm base to your business. In turn you will experience the productivity for sure.

Keep away from distractions like TV or fm radios. They are the prime enemy for your business work. You can turn them on when you are free, but not during your business hours. Set your table in a place devoid of these kinds of distractions.

Have you heard of many saying all work and no play makes one dull. That means a lot. Have fun when you are done with your job or during your break hours. You will become really fresh after having some fun. Start your work fresh.

You might try working offline to avoid distractions through internet. Deal with your mail accounts offline. If you are online, limit yourself for essential usage and nothing more.

Multitasking is a must for a good business man. You can try to concentrate on other works if you are waiting for a content to be printed or in between your phone calls. Ultimately you can get more work done in less time.

Consider yourself as your boss or head. Speak to your conscience about the daily goals. Reward yourself for a job well done.

Sometimes you may find it too difficult to carry the business single handed. During those circumstances don’t hesitate to get assistance from your family or friends.

Starting a blog to make money online is so popular these days. Yet wher percentage of bloggers actually succeed? While I think a good amount of bloggers make money online, most are making pennies a day. Very few actually take blogging to the next level and start bringing in hundreds a day.

Now you might think that bringing in hundreds a day through your blog is going to be really tough. If you are making pennies a day right now you might even think you’ll need to get a 100 times as many visitors to your site to make hundreds. This is false. If you are making pennies a day, it’s because you’re using the wrong money making model. Use the right model that I will share with you to monetize your blog and you’ll see more and more income.

Many bloggers just slap ads on their blog (adsense and such) and then wonder why they are only making pennies. There is nothing wrong with putting adsense on an older blog that you don’t update or that you lost interest in. However if you have an active blog that you regularly update, adsense is a waste of space on your pages. Instead you need to create a product.

Now creating a produc might sound complicated, it’s not. Your product could be a telisiminar, an audio recording, or just simply a pdf ebook. Let’s start with the ebook. It’s the easiest and quickest to create. So how do you create one?

First you start out by surveying your blog readers. Lets say you write on weight loss. Post a survey asking your readers what their biggest pains and frusterations with weight loss are. Now take their responses and their issues, do research, and write out the solutios in an ebook. Once the ebook is done, sell it through your blog. Your readers will certainly buy it because inside is the answers to the questions they’ve already been asking.

During the past 3-4 years I’ve probably researched and read about every possible way you can make money online. And I’ve found that every money making method fits under one of two categories.

You can make money online by helping others make money. Or you can make money online by helping others solve their problems or achieve their dreams.

How do you make money online by hleping others make money? You get paid for advertising their products, you become an affiliate (working on commision) or you send them traffic for an agreed upon payment. This is a great place to start when you are new to the internet. However this isn’t where the big bucks are. But it’s certainly a great place to get your feet wet and experiment.

The second way to make money online is by helping others either solve their problems or acheive their dreams. This is where the big bucks are. You basically find a group of people online (through forums, blogs, social networking sites) that have a need or a want that’s unfulfilled. You research their need or want. You learn all you can about it. Then you created a product (ebook, audio or video recording) that has the solution they are looking for…

With this method, the smaller the intial group the better. Lets say you have a friend who wants to learn how to train her hamster but can’t find any books on the topic. This might be a great opportunity for you to do some research and create an online hamster training guide that you can sell.

Now what are you waiting for? Go out there and start making money online.

I’m sure you’ve probably thought about it many times. Many assume that starting a business is tough, takes a lot of responsibility, many long nights and is hard work. Well they’re wrong. Because no ones starts a multi million dollar corporation from day one. In fact most business start out as hobbies or something one does in his/her free time and eventually over months and years turn into an actual business.

So how do you get started. Simply start using your free time more wisely. Make a list of all your talens/abilities (especially ones that others have commented on or were impressed by). Now see if you can make money by applying and combining those talents and abilities. Lets say you can design websites…well then here is a great way to make money. Build websites for people, many would be willing to pay you a small fee for it. Many would even be will to pay you for consulting and helping them grow their websites once they are up and running.

It shocks me how finances are one of the most neglected aspects in many people’s lives. Fortunately I grew up with a family that taught me how to manage my finances well from a young age. I also got my first job when I was 15 years old which I think helped make me more responsible with money. Once I realized that it takes hard work to make money I started being more picky about what to buy and what to spend on.

I was surprised when I learned that for most people credit card debt is the norm. It seems like there are more people who don’t pay their credit card balance on time than those who do. Now I’m not juding anyone, I don’t know everyone’s situation or circumstances. However in my own life I know I’ve worked my butt off to make sure I don’t get in debt. I always had the feeling that if I owned anyone or any company money they would basically own me the only exception being getting a mortgage to buy a house. To avoid debt I workd 35 hours a week while managin a full time class schedule in all of my 4 years in college. Guess what? I didn’t go out with friends much, I was generally either at work, at school or at home doing homework. Yes it was hard and at times left me feeling a little depressed. But once I graduated I reaped the rewards. I had no college loans to pay and no financial pressure.

Often when starting a business one is very concerned with his/her great new business ideas, sometimes even tries to keep it a secret and not share it so it’s not stolen. I used to think the exact same way but then one day I realized that business ideas are worthless. Here is why…

What really makes a business idea good or bad isn’t the idea itself rather it’s the result. When youtube decided to launch their website, and then later one became successful a lot of people foolishly looked back and thought oh they had a clever business idea. No they didn’t. In fact youtube wasn’t even the first online video sharing site. What YouTube had was great execution. They build an easy to use, intuitive video portal that anyone without any technical skills could look at and instantly understand how to use.

Still think business ideas are important? Well let me give you another example Google. When google started their were already two huge major search engines (yahoo and msn). So google’s idea wasn’t original by any means rather it was how they executed their idea. They build a much more accurate search engines than anything else at that point in time.

So what’s the poing of all this? Next time you get a business idea you gotta start executing right away, it’s the only way you’ll know whether it’s good and bad. Often you don’t even have to worry about people stealing it, because people will only think it’s good once it’s a success at which point you will be on top anyways.

What is the value of money? Well it’s the value society assigns to it. What’s the value of a five dollar bill? Can you really explain it without thinking of what you can purchase with the bill? A five dollar bill is just a peice of paper. A thousand years ago it would have been worthless. However today especially in America it has value to it. How come? Because as a nation we decided to give it value, we decide it to use to facilitate the exchange of goods, it’s a system of trust we agreed upon.

With the falling economy, the falling value of the dollar and the tough financial times many are wondering whether the dollar will become worthless one day. I think that’s the wrong question. Because the dollar is just a peice of paper. I think one needs to focus on the work and effort that goes into making a dollar. That work and effort is the real value. As long as one is willing to work hard and create value for others then they will get value back. So the question should be, am I creating value for others? or how can I offer more value to others?